SCORE! Daiya cheese and vegan hot cocoa from scratch!

I'm SO stoked. At a recent shopping trip to Earth Fare on the other end of town, I picked up a bag of Daiya's mozz cheese... which i've been meaning to get for awhile now after all the good reviews I've heard (short of my newly vegan friend who thinks its texture is funky). Well it sat in the fridge a day or two - hard to get motivated to make food sometimes...

Until tonight... I made another pita pizza (if you're wondering why so many pizzas - Mike & I bought two packages of pitas on clearance at Kroger... for cheap. They were hard then, they're crust and chipping now, weeks later... but they make great pizzas still!!).

First, let me say - I opened the bag and took a sniff. Didn't smell offensive. I was tempted to just toss it on the pita and toast it without trying it because ALL of the other vegan cheese I've ever had has made me want to gag. Instead I braved it and put some in my mouth... and it was ACTUALLY YUMMY! SHOCKING!

So I cut up a portobello (why is it my spell checker hates this word?) mushroom, a bit of sweet onion, and some mashed eggplant (baba ghanoush type stuff) I made yesterday... sprinkled with daiya... toasted in the toaster oven. Fabulous. So excited. I think this stuff can be used on tacos, in wraps, anywhere you would use cheese. I can FINALLY make a lasagna or eggplant "parm" and actually LIKE it. I could squeal... but instead I'll sit back and enjoy my hot chocolate... thanks to this recipe.

This is INCREDIBLY simple to make and doesn't take very much time at all. Instead of sugar I used agave syrup... and I only used 2 cups almond milk instead of the 2 1/3 to see what it would taste like... I may have used just a TINY bit more vanilla... because it poured out too quickly :P Only problem with it is that its a TINY bit too sweet, which might be due to the fact that I didn't use enough milk, next time I'll try a little less sweetener.

I have plans to use it as a coffee creamer/sweetener. We'll see how that goes!

Until next time... be healthy and don't forget to smile.